Category Archives: Internet

2012 is the year of streaming video, apparently

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This was originally posted on here Simply Read – http://www.simplysyndicated.com/2012-is-the-year-of-streaming-video-apparently/

I really didn’t see this one coming, but there’s no denying that it actually happened. Suddenly every box under my TV streams video. I feel a little bit behind the times with this one because there have been streaming video products available for a long time, it’s just that now it seems everything is a streaming video player, and more importantly, that there are lots of places to get the video.

For a little while you’ve been able to put your hands on things like a PS3, or XBox 360 that had some sort of video rental service. To be fair the PS3 has always been ahead of the XBox in terms of the available video services. The PS3 has had LoveFilm and BBC iPlayer for some time. Smart TVs and higher end BluRay players have had similar functionality.

Now that functionality has expanded all over the place. With the recent dashboard update the XBox did what so many people are doing these days and added apps. You can now download the Netflix app, the LoveFilm app, the 4OD app, and the list goes on. There’s even streaming live TV from Sky.

In addition to that it isn’t just high end BluRay players that have all the streaming services any more. I just got a Sony S380 for just £89 from Amazon and that comes with pretty much everything you’ll find on a PS3 except the ability to play the games of course.

And there’s more. Today Sky announced that their Anytime+ service is now available to all Sky+HD customers. Before it was only available if you had Sky’s broadband service, but now that’s no longer necessary. On hearing that I did rush to stick an ethernet cable into the back of our Sky box but I don’t know how to make the Anytime+ thing work so I can’t tell you if it’s any good or not. I’ll write something else about it when I get it working. Perhaps the most surprising part of their announcement is that they’re going to have BBC iPlayer content available over the system.

Through all of this iPlayer is a service that is now conspicuous in its absence. We’re told that it is coming sometime this year to XBox, just as Sky say the content is coming to their system sometime this year. the fact remains that unless you’re a Sony fan (hello to that person) putting iPlayer on your TV is one of the hardest things to do. Before the BluRay player, I was doing it with a hacked AppleTV.

Ah but what of Apple? For a long time they have had a much loved but maybe undersold runner in this race. The Apple TV. The product that some people love so much, they think that there’s going to be an actual TV set made by Apple. I have just seen my Apple TV die this last week, not too upsetting as it is so old that it must have been part of the first run of the device. The current model is very small and very cheap. It streams content from your iTunes library to your television more easily than any other device on the market, although others can perform the same basic task. It will even let you rent movies from the iTunes store, which has the same basic new movie selection as the XBox, PS3 or the growing number of smarter TVs and BluRay players. It also has Netflix and YouTube functionality much like all the other streaming video players.

The Apple TV is in danger of becoming irrelevant as more and more devices replicate its functionality. For a long time the Apple TV has been the cheapest of all the streaming video options, at £99 it is a great little device. However that simply isn’t true any more, and it does face another bigger problem. Look at that Sony BluRay player. For a start it cost me £10 less than an Apple TV would have. If I was just looking for a streaming video player then it wins on price alone. The important thing is that I didn’t buy the BluRay player as a streaming video player. I bought it as a BluRay player. That really means that I now have no reason to replace my Apple TV.

On top of that, I didn’t buy my XBox as a streaming video player either, that was bought as a gaming machine, and now it does more video than the Apple TV ever dreamed of. So with all of these devices I’ll not bother replacing the broken Apple TV. There’s just nothing that it does that need to do.

Right now we’re also lucky enough to see the start of a streaming service battle in the UK. We just got Netflix and they are aggressively standing toe to toe with LoveFilm, which is effectively Amazon’s UK based video offering. Both cost around a fiver each month and offer an impressive selection of video content, with more being added to each service all the time. At the moment I feel like Netflix has the edge on functionality, you can happily enjoy your online content through iOS and Android apps, LoveFilm don’t offer such a thing. However LoveFilm has a larger selection of content at the moment, but you’re locked to your TV or computer. Nether are perfect, and they both use Silverlight on their websites which just makes me angry.

So now we’re at the point where if you’ve got some sort of box plugged into your TV then the chances are that you can stick an internet cable into it and get yourself some streaming video. I suppose this stuff still impresses me because I remember our first VCR arriving at the house. Now I can pretty much be watching any film I can think of in the next 30 seconds. We truly do live in the future now.

Facebook Profile Changes

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It seems all there is to write about since this blog came back, is social networking. Oh well, when life gives you razorblades, you make a baseball bat with razorblades in it. (A special prize goes to the person who can tell me what film that’s from). Anyway, Facebook went and did all sorts of things, some of which are already live and in use on my own profile.

First of all there’s the Timeline. Not the amazing classic film, but a timeline of all the things you do on Facebook, and they hope, the entire internet. Users can scroll back through time and see all the pictures of your holiday that you posted, and they can see what you’ve been listening to on Spotify today, and what colour your pants are. I think the best way to describe it is by saying it’s a bit like Twitter, just with pictures, and too much other stuff. Really it’s just a new page layout for your profile, and is very unlikely to change social networking in the way some bloggers have been saying.

Then there’s Subscribers. I used to have my own personal Facebook profile, which I reserved for personal things. I’m not friends with anyone on FB that I’m not friends with in real life, much to the disappointment of many podcast listeners. My public persona was confined to a FB Page. The difference between a Page and a Profile was that somebody didn’t have to be your friend to follow the content on your Page, but they do have to be your friend to see what’s going on with your Profile. FB have flipped that around. Now people can subscribe to your Profile, without having to be your friend, and you can choose what those people get to see. I have now abandoned my Page and am running everything through my Profile (there’s a link to the right side of this page if you want to see it). This is also like Twitter, with a nice dose of Google+ built in.

Of the new features FB announced last week, those are the only two I have available to me at the moment, and so I can’t really comment on anything else. So far FB have taken some of the better features of Twitter and Google+, and just copied them. Can’t say I blame them, they are good ideas, and a better way of working things. I just don’t think they’re going to change the world.

Social Networking Etiquette Part 1

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My main problem with social networks, is that they make things simple for people who can’t work the internet. Can’t understand email? Then there’s Facebook messenger. Can’t work Flickr? Then there’s Facebook photos. Personally I’m of the belief that if you can’t be bothered to learn how the internet works, then you shouldn’t be spoiling it for the rest of us. Unfortunately, people don’t really think about how these social networks operate either. Let me give you a rough example of something I experienced the other day.

1. Person posts an opinion about a film they’re watching

2. People start to comment on that post, including me. Comments are about the film the original poster is watching.

3. A friend of the poster comes on to comment about the film, and for some reason ends their comment with “How are you anyway?”

4. A conversation between the poster and the last commenter begins, talking about their holidays, weddings, babies etc.

5. All of their conversation gets sent to my phone comment by comment, and I’m forced to read their talk of babies when all I did was say a film was shit.

So let me take you through social networking etiquette. In this lesson you should learn that comments on status updates, are for commenting on that particular status update. If you want to know how your friend is, send them a private message. Please remember that not all of their friends know you, or give even the slightest crap about your holiday or wedding plans. Better yet, remember that there is such a thing as email, and you can use it to chat all you like in total privacy, without annoying people who don’t know you. If you don’t have the email address of the person you’re trying to contact, perhaps they don’t really want to hear from you, just sayin’.

On Facebook Today

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On Facebook today, my friend Craig said

“Gonna jump on the Facebook Complaints Bandwaggon. “FFS Facebook!” There. Done.”

His comment is in reference to the new design of Facebook. My issue isn’t with the new design, but that Facebook classified that post as a “Top Story”. Now, I’m not here to comment on the content of Craig’s post, but I would like to say that no matter how you look at it, there’s simply no way that you could class it as a story. It’s a status update, it’s a comment, it’s a statement, but it’s not a story.

Now I look at my news feed, I see that nobody I follow has taken the time to write a story. Clearly we just aren’t using Facebook like they want us to.